A Birth in a Death

It was the fall of 2008. Each day we were running on start-up, entrepreneurial adrenaline while working out of Andrew Schiestel‘s apartment in downtown London, Ontario. Our company was only 6 months old at the time. Our small and nimble team of 4 created a fundraising product that we hoped would change the world. We had everything: vision, heart, soul, and a fresh new customer based in Colorado who had made a $250,000 purchase order for our new and revolutionary fundraising product.

This wasn’t your average day of excitement that most entrepreneurs feel. This particular day we were on edge. Our new, large client had run into financial problems. The 2008 US recession had struck just weeks earlier and not only were the charity’s donations declining, a Fortune 100 sponsor was considering yanking their $5 million annual donation.

This charity had around $160,000 in receivables with our company and their CEO was talking with Andrew about the matter.

As Andrew finished the phone call, he looked at the three other partners with tension and paused. His face was solemn. It said it all.

Andrew said, “There’s a high likelihood that they can’t pay their invoices.”

It didn’t take the CFO of a Fortune 500 company to figure out what this would mean for our business. Our company, then called Tagged By Kindness, was only 6 months old and this one customer accounted for about 98% of our revenue. If this client didn’t pay their invoices, we’d be out of business within 2 months.

Back in 2008, tbk Creative wasn’t the web design and digital marketing agency you know it as today. Originally, we were a fundraising company called Tagged By Kindness Inc. That’s where the term ‘tbk’ comes from. We produced gift cards that tracked the movement of acts of kindness online through unique ID numbers. Andrew Schiestel and one of the original partners, Misha Allard, conjured up the idea one night after watching the movie Pay It Forward. They thought that if people could see where their acts of kindness went – even the smallest acts – it may motivate more people to be kinder to others in the world.

The product was good in concept but had its hiccups. Here’s how distribution worked: We’d sell the product to schools at wholesale prices, students would resell at retail prices, and the retail profit margin would go to the schools to raise money for various projects and initiatives. Unfortunately, the younger students (kindergarten to Grade 2) had difficulty understanding the concept and therefore communicating how it worked to family and neighbours. We also faced issues with the older students (Grades 5 and 6) who felt it was uncool to be associated with organized kindness. But we learned a very valuable lesson in marketing:

“It’s easier to sell a product to consumers that they already know they want.”

We forget who it was, but someone said it best: When you sell a chocolate bar, there’s no explaining it. Humans have figured that out over millennia.

Fortunately, our Colorado-based client ended up paying their invoices in full. They were kind-hearted people and we think they knew our company would go under if they didn’t pay. Our company had a short-term lifeline but we still had a hard decision to make.

The Crossroads

With the invoices paid, our company had a short-term lifeline, but still left us with a hard decision to make. The way we saw it, we had three options:

Fix some of the issues with the fundraising product and continue with the business model, or

Disperse whatever capital was left in the company to the shareholders and close down Tagged By Kindness.

A third option arose as well. Around this time, a charity in Oakville contacted us because they liked the creative and web work we’d completed for our own company. That sparked an idea, and we had the resources to make it happen. Melissa had an artistic background with an uncanny, raw talent for making creative decisions and understanding the complexities of products quickly. Andrew had built his first website at 15 years old, and lived and breathed the Internet. We also had a programmer who worked with us on contract at the time.

The third option became the new future of tbk:

We would transition Tagged By Kindness into a web design and digital marketing company. We would sell websites, creative and other digital marketing services to produce short-term, consistent revenue, and then one day, we’d get back to working on large social projects that would make the world better.

We chose option three and in 2010, tbk Creative was born.

Hello tbk

The Digital Chasm

Becoming a web design and marketing firm that focused on great creative as well as new technologies such as social media marketing, made a lot of sense to us at the time. In 2010, we noticed a chasm in the industry, at least in Southwestern Ontario. There were web design firms that were building well-coded websites but were largely missing the mark with high-quality creative. Then there were traditional marketing and communications agencies that understood the importance of brand identity and creative but most weren’t building websites or offering digital services. Many were slow catching up to digital, as the bulk of their revenue came from creative services and 15% media buying fees. And when we launched, very few marketing or web design firms were focusing on social media marketing services as a core service offering for their business.

We thought tbk Creative could be a company to fill the chasm. We would focus on architecturally sound web design and results-oriented digital marketing, while maintaining a focus on brand identity and creative.

In January 2010, tbk Creative was born, and by March our own website was live.

Starting a company isn’t easy, but we learned very quickly that this is especially true with a marketing agency. To get a seat at the table with a client you need an adequate work portfolio and a list of clients that are larger than or comparable in size to the company you’re talking to.

Starting out, we had neither a portfolio nor a list of past clients that we’d worked with. As you can imagine, this was a recipe for disaster. We felt like Odysseus trying to travel home from Troy to Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey. Initially, times were austere and we weren’t doing enough revenue each month to support all four of the original partners’ salaries. It made the most sense for Melissa and Andrew to stay with tbk Creative, as Melissa was driving creative direction and overseeing website production, and Andrew was handling new client acquisition and overseeing the digital marketing programs. The company ended up purchasing the shares from the other two partners (Scott and Misha). Scott went into real estate development with his brother and Misha joined the marketing department of a consumer product goods company in Toronto.

Sink or Swim

We weren’t going to survive if we didn’t start working with clients, but we were still stuck with little portfolio work. We needed a way to begin acquiring clients.

One day, we had an idea: why not offer free graphic design credits to select companies? We thought that if we could do some pro bono work we could build our client list, develop a portfolio and begin to prove ourselves. Andrew went to an International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) London event and started handing out his business cards and telling the recipients that they could receive a $750 graphic design credit. He offered this to four recognizable groups in London.

Only one took him up on the offer: Brescia University College, which is an affiliate of Western University.

We ended up doing a one-page print ad for Brescia and offered to build a website pro bono for one of their foundation groups. We were so wet behind the ears in the agency world that it was almost embarrassing. At the first meeting with Brescia, their marketing director at the time, Sheila Blagrave, said, “We’ll send you an RFP for a different project that’s coming up.” We didn’t know what RFP stood for back then. Andrew said, “Sure.” If they were offering an RFP, and the acronym sounded good to us, we were going to take it (we later learned through Google what it was).

The project the marketing director had alluded to was undertaking the graphic design for their annual report.

We submitted a proposal and lost. This was our first official bid so Andrew called Sheila up and asked if she’d be willing to provide feedback on our proposal. She was.

Then a video project came up. We partnered with a freelance videographer and bid on it. We lost again. Again, Andrew asked Sheila for advice and she was kind enough to give it.

With each failure we learned a little bit more about how this industry works.

Then a third project came up, this time for a video recruitment project for Brescia University College, King’s University College and Huron University College.

We bid again and won. And for the budget, did a good job on the video.

In London, Ontario, working with these three recognized brands was what we needed to contend for the better work in the area. We were finally being seen as a legitimate company.

The Campaign That
Made Our Agency

In the fall of 2010, shortly after the video project, a friend of ours, Allison Graham (President at Elevate Biz), referred us to one of southwestern Ontario’s largest law firms, Siskinds LLP. They had commenced a class action legal proceeding against one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical brands for a birth control product that was allegedly causing more serious side effects for women than the warning labels cautioned. The law firm wanted to use social media to attract potential class members because traditional media was too cost-prohibitive at this stage in the proceeding.

Guided by what these campaigns usually look like and sticking a bit too much in our own comfort zone, we planned a typical campaign. We’d create a video and a Facebook page that gave the basic information about the class action with the message, “If you’ve been affected by [insert problem], call [insert phone number].” Very standard, non-inspiring, predictable stuff. Much like what you’ve seen in the past by law firms when advertising class actions.

We filmed a lawyer in the foyer at Siskinds LLP head office verbalizing a rehearsed script about the issue. We were prepared to launch a video and a Facebook page to accompany this video.

It was the day before launching the campaign and something struck Melissa. She said out loud:

“It’s not going to work. The message is off. We missed it. It’s not about being affected and calling a phone number. It’s about women’s rights. Women weren’t given all the information they needed to make an informed decision about their bodies.”

“ It’s about women’s rights. ”

We needed a name to summarize this campaign and messaging. We called it Take Your Body Back.

Andrew called Siskinds LLP and requested an emergency meeting. We met that afternoon with the Marketing Director, Laurie Hause, and lead lawyer for the case, Matthew Baer. After thoughtful deliberation, it became unanimous – a new campaign would be created – one that would focus more on women’s rights and less on the law firm’s brand and technicalities regarding the legal proceeding.

About a week after that meeting, Take Your Body Back was launched.

Most law firms, as you know, are historically conservative. Doing this campaign truly was going out on the limb and we acknowledge Matthew and Laurie from Siskinds LLP for taking a chance on it.

The campaign went on to attract countless new class members, hit national PR being reported on coast to coast, won an IABC award, and won “Best Social Media Campaign in the Legal Industry” at the Web Marketing Association’s 2012 Internet Advertising Competition.

In a London Free Press article, University of Windsor law professor Jasminka Kalajdzic, said, “Ingenious… It is the first example of social media for class actions that I am aware of in Canada.”

Best Social Media Campaign In the Legal Industry

2012 Internet Advertising Competition

Despite how good we were building websites at this time, it was tbk Creative’s social media work that kept getting written about for better or worse. We say worse because we were truly building great websites, but many groups in the community were still hiring traditional web design firms for their work because they only thought tbk Creative was a social media firm.

We can’t blame anyone in particular. In 2010 and 2011 we focussed heavily on social media. We were one of Canada’s first agencies building Facebook marketing apps (this was before companies like Wildfire and Offerpop were popular). And Andrew spent a lot of time analyzing social media trends and behaviour at an empirical level too. He launched a 6-month series for The London Free Press that looked at how Londoners behave on Twitter, and published interesting, hit research projects such as Canada’s Happiest Cities on Twitter and Canada’s Most Vulgar Cities on Twitter that were reported on by national media publications. The Vulgar Cities report was especially popular, appearing across major Canadian news outlets including CBC, CTV, Toronto Star, Canadian Press, The Globe & Mail, Huffington Post, Yahoo! News, and others. MacLean’s magazine even published the report in print in The MacLean’s Book of Lists, Vol. 2.

All this work landed Andrew a contributing columnist position with the London Free Press where Andrew writes on how the web, digital, and social media affect consumers and brands.

Despite entering the social media world early and with great momentum, we weren’t prone to failure as an agency. One day, an intern from Moosehead Breweries found tbk Creative through Google, was enthralled with our work and invited us to come in to meet with Moosehead to discuss becoming their social media agency of record.

We met with their marketing team. They liked our work – especially the “Take Your Body Back” campaign – but ended up giving the work to a large Toronto agency.

In hindsight, we weren’t ready to work with Moosehead at that time. There was still a lot Melissa and Andrew didn’t understand about the agency world. It’s interesting how life sometimes works out, though. Little did we know, this first encounter with Moosehead would lead to tbk Creative working with an international brand two years later. But before that was to happen, Ontario’s largest manufacturer of vinyl windows entered our lives.

Our Window of Opportunity

After the Moosehead loss, we went on with our lives. Then one day in 2012, we got a call from our friend, Karen Anderson. She had just finished a meeting with the CEO of North Star Windows & Doors, Lorne Girard. Lorne expressed interest in learning how social media could help North Star, Ontario’s largest manufacturer of vinyl windows (of all the windows in Ontario homes, about 35% of them are North Star).

Andrew went in and met with Lorne and the two of them had a very deep, natural chemistry. After Andrew analyzed North Star’s marketing goals, it became apparent that they needed an integrated approach to their digital marketing. The company at the time was largely dependent on radio advertising across 20 or so markets, but Lorne recognized that consumer behaviours were shifting, traditional media had their limitations, and that digital channels needed to have a stronger role in North Star’s marketing efforts. Like many of the decisions Lorne made in his career, he wanted to be proactive and make sure that North Star was ready for this shift before a lot of the company’s competitors.

After we put forth a proposal for North Star’s digital marketing, their current 10-year-old marketing and communications agency pushed back and tried to talk North Star into choosing only one agency to represent the brand. North Star’s response was to let tbk Creative and their current agency bid on the entire business, which included the radio component. Admittedly, the traditional agency was more experienced with radio campaigns, but North Star ended up awarding tbk Creative the entire business. North Star felt that the future was digital and that tbk Creative could get them there.

Andrew still remembers getting the phone call from Lorne (the CEO) and Jesse Dyck (Sales Manager) at about 4 PM on a weekday. Lorne and Jesse were making the call from their St. Thomas, Ontario office and said: “Andrew, North Star would like to award the work to tbk Creative.” Andrew showed controlled, positive emotion and stoically thanked Lorne and Jesse, warmly saying, “Great, we look forward to producing some great work with your team.”

Clients like making the phone call to the winning agency and providing the good news. Quite often, they expect a big, positive reaction on the other line, but they don’t always get what they hoped for. If you’re on the client side, I’ll explain why this occurs. The agency doesn’t want to appear vulnerable by showing how much this business matters to their agency. We have this weird belief that if we’re too excited, you’ll take the work away. But trust us when we say this, every phone call you’ve made to a winning agency – even if you didn’t get a great, positive reaction – mattered a lot to them.

The moment Andrew got off the phone with Lorne and Jesse, he yelled at the top of his lungs, “Melissa! North Star gave us the business!” Melissa ran downstairs and they did this out of control, ecstatic happy-dance together.

For two years, we worked with North Star Windows and Doors and knocked things out of the park. Lorne’s patience, discipline and commitment to excellence was inspiring to tbk Creative and his values rubbed off on us in a big way. We became a better agency for working with Lorne Girard and the North Star Windows and Doors brand.

Ontario’s largest vinyl windows manufacturer.

For North Star, tbk Creative built one of the best manufacturing websites at the time in North America (2013), rolled out an effective, integrated digital marketing strategy, and even figured out how to buy their radio (with the help of a third party consultant). And together, North Star and tbk Creative went on to win two international marketing awards:

“Outstanding Website in Manufacturing” at the 2013 Internet Advertising Competition.

Things were good and Lorne and Andrew developed a deep friendship. To this day, Andrew tells people that Lorne was one of his greatest business mentors.

Lorne Girard retired from North Star in September 2014. We believe he’s one of Southwestern Ontario’s great business leaders of our time. He’s mostly unknown to the larger business community because he almost always turned down media interviews and never had much interest in putting North Star in awards competitions. Some of the great habits Lorne had were:

Lorne practiced Management By Walking Around (MBWA). By asking “Why?” five-times more often, he challenged the status quo and allowed his team to grow, which, in turn, continually improved the business.

He called at least two customers on a daily basis to see how their businesses were doing. He also called at least two suppliers on a weekly basis to continually nurture vendor relations and stay in better touch with the industry.

Each day, he arrived early at the office, using the additional time to reflect and focus on setting three goals or priorities for the day. His day only ended once these goals were complete.

Life was good for our agency. tbk Creative experienced a boom for about a year, going from 4 staff members to 11. More iconic brands in southwestern Ontario were choosing tbk Creative as their web design and digital marketing agency. Little did we know, trouble was right around the corner.

Times Getting Tough

Up until about 2013, we focused predominantly on producing great work. We thought the work mattered so much that we didn’t hire account managers for our ongoing services. Instead, we had the production team (copywriters or search marketing specialists) handle the account management. We felt this approach resulted in:

Less billing for clients because there were fewer team members involved on an account

Greater client satisfaction because clients were able to speak directly to a service specialist on a regular basis

Boy, were we wrong.

In September 2013, things started to change. Lorne Girard of North Star Windows and Doors retired and a new CEO was hired. After sending out only one email campaign, which was successful, we were dismissed as their agency, as the CEO wanted to take the company in a different direction.

Around this time we also lost one of our other largest clients: a medium-sized Canadian retailer with about 20 store locations.

Then it dawned on Melissa what was happening. Our work was still producing great work, but we lacked strong relationships with our clients. When we were smaller, Andrew and Melissa were the account managers. This worked with 4 staff members, but not when we grew past 10. Melissa started to research other agencies and found that most agencies had 3 times the account managers that tbk Creative had relative to size.

Not to say there isn’t some agencies in Canada producing great work but there are many agencies that produce average work, yet are thriving. We thought about this more and figured it out:

The work

isn’t enough

There appears to be a sufficiency threshold in marketing: If an agency can produce work that is good enough, they can keep the account by having a sound relationship with the client.

So we set out to find great, dedicated account managers for tbk Creative.

We were also struggling with inconsistencies in our programming, and didn’t have a team leader who was managing the department. So we ended up hiring a senior programmer from 3M Canada named Andre Lefort for tbk Creative’s VP of technology role. Andre was on the team that built 3M’s B2B e-commerce platform that transacts over $5 billion each year.

The web industry is mostly unregulated and because clients don’t see code, they often don’t really know what they are getting. Andre brought to tbk Creative a rigorous approach to coding and development that has allowed us to build large-scale technological solutions for our clients.

Our chance to make the world better, again.

In late 2013, tbk Creative was hired by one of our clients to make their website accessible for individuals with disabilities.

This was in response to a new law in the Province of Ontario called the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA).

Under the Integrated Accessibility Standard Regulation of the AODA, large companies (over 50 employees working in Ontario) must ensure that they meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0).

To facilitate the work, we were going to use a free tool that was popular with many groups in Ontario. Melissa was sceptical. Although popular amongst developers, it was built by a non-profit consortium 5-6 years ago and there was no literature that spoke to its accuracy or whether it was being consistently maintained. The question she posed was:

“How do we know if this free tool is accurate?”

So we ended up building a microsite that would purposely fail all 25 guidelines of WCAG 2.0 Level A (the universal guidelines for building accessible technologies) with the goal of seeing how many of the guidelines the tool caught. The tool ended up missing 5 of the 25 guidelines (20%). We figured if we’re going to run into this obstacle with making our clients’ websites WCAG 2.0 compliant, that others would have the same issue. With that knowledge, in 2013 we invested a lot of resources into building our own web-based software that would scan websites and help developers and content producers maintain accessible websites.

We called this new software AODA Online.

AODA Online was a quick hit in the Ontario marketplace. Groups like Tim Hortons, Staples, Goodlife Fitness, Blue Mountain, Western University, Niagara School Board, and many of Canada’s largest marketing agencies and web development firms have all used AODA Online to help make and maintain accessible websites.

Ontario’s web accessibility software™.

We were also hired by brands and agencies to help new website development projects meet the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. We’ve since worked with some of Canada’s largest brands, helping them make accessible web properties.

If you wish for our assistance in ensuring your websites are accessible and meet the AODA, go to AODA Online’s website and sign up for an account or reach out to us directly.

We feel really good about AODA Online. We started Tagged By Kindness Inc. to make the world better. Financially, we couldn’t keep that concept afloat. AODA Online is our chance to make the world better through business. We believe all people, despite level of ability, have the right to access information via the web. When people have access to information, they can increase the quality of their lives by making better, more informed decisions.

An old acquaintance reappears.

By 2014, tbk Creative was providing something very special to its clients. We were building some of Canada’s highest quality WordPress websites, had an effective account management structure, were producing digital marketing solutions that were dramatically growing brands, and were helping to make Ontario accessible through AODA Online. Most importantly, we had heart and a passion for doing great work for great people.

Then, one day, someone filled out our web form. It was the intern from Moosehead from a few years ago. This time she didn’t work at Moosehead. She had completed her intern tenure and had gone on to become a marketing manager at Danby®, a 65-year-old appliance company and one of Canada’s largest and most recognized appliance companies.

One of Danby’s subsidiary companies, Silhouette Appliances® required a new brand identity and website. It was an established company with good revenue, but it was missing a brand position and the website wasn’t living up to the expectations of the Danby team.

Danby hired tbk Creative to build a new, state-of-the-art corporate website on WordPress and create a brand identity that would match the high quality of the company’s products.

With gratitude, around this time word was starting to get out about the quality of our solutions and more iconic brands started contacting tbk Creative. Around the same time that we started working with Danby on the Silhouette Appliances website, Jiffy Lube® Ontario (representing 60 stores) contacted tbk Creative. Like Moosehead, Jiffy Lube® found tbk Creative through a Google search.

tbk Creative ended up forming a strong partnership with Jiffy Lube®. The brand had a significant market share in Ontario but was falling behind certain oil change competitors and car dealerships in their presence online.

We believe in the power of digital, and both tbk Creative and Jiffy Lube Ontario’s marketing team worked hard to build their digital presence in a short period of time.

Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s Results:

(year-to-year comparable)

We believe in the power of digital, and both tbk Creative and Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s marketing team worked hard to build their digital presence in a short period of time.

Some of the items we created for Jiffy Lube included:

New website on WordPress

Digital Advertising

Email Marketing

Online Sweepstakes

Blog Writing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Social Media Marketing

It’s 2018.

What you’ve read to this point in our story was written in 2014. The following is an update, written in January 2018.

It’s now 2018. At the time of this writing, tbk Creative has 25 staff members that we’re immensely proud of, and a large handful of reputable small, medium, and large business clients that we’re devoted to continually helping succeed in the digital marketing space.

Many things have occurred since 2014. A milestone for the company came in 2016, when tbk Creative was named “Small Business of the Year” at the London Chamber of Commerce’s Business Achievement Awards (after a close miss as finalists in 2014).

Part of the team accepting the Small Business of the Year award at the London Chamber's 2016 Business Achievement Awards.

Being recognized as a marketplace leader.

In the fall of 2015, we received an unexpected letter in the mail. Consumer Choice Award, a national business services awards company in 14 markets , named tbk Creative top “Web Design” provider in London, Ontario.

With much gratitude, tbk Creative went on to be named top “Web Design” provider by Consumer Choice Award in London, Ontario for three consecutive years – 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Some of the team accepting the award on behalf of tbk Creative for top Web Design provider in London, Ontario in 2016.

Melissa and Andrew accepting the award on behalf of tbk Creative for top Web Design provider in London, Ontario in 2017.

Some of the team accepting the awards on behalf of tbk Creative for top Web Design and top Online Marketing provider in London, Ontario in 2018.

International bound

Melissa McInerney (CEO & Chief Creative Officer), at the helm of tbk Creative’s operations and service solutions, has continually strived to keep tbk Creative’s work quality measured on an international industry stage.

Since 2012, tbk Creative has gone on to win 14 international web design and digital marketing awards.

Best Marketing Website

2017 IAC Awards

Outstanding Manufacturing Website

2017 WebAwards

Real Estate Standard of Excellence

2017 WebAwards

Outstanding Manufacturing Website

2017 IAC Awards

Outstanding Retail Integrated Ad Campaign

2017 IAC Awards

Best Website Design

2016 CALM Awards

Outstanding Website in Law

2016 WebAwards

Outstanding Website in Transportation

2016 WebAwards

Best Manufacturing Website

2016 IAC Awards

Best Retail Integrated Ad Campaign

2016 IAC Awards

Best Legal Industry Social Media Campaign

2013 IAC Awards

Best Health Care Provider Online Campaign

2013 IAC Awards

Best Manufacturing Online Campaign

2013 IAC Awards

Best Legal Industry Social Media Campaign

2012 IAC Awards

Standing for business

In 2014, Andrew Schiestel was asked to serve as a director on the Board of Directors for the London Chamber of Commerce. The London Chamber was the first business group tbk Creative joined back in 2010, and being a member at that time provided us access to other businesses at a time when we didn’t have many contacts.

As part of Schiestel’s functions as a Director at the Chamber, he was asked to act as liaison to the organization’s Government Affairs committee. There, he became heavily involved and took a great interest in public policy work. He took a particular keen interest in seeing Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation reformed to be easier for companies to comply with while still protecting consumers.

In 2014 as well, Schiestel was the originating author (through the London Chamber) of the 2015 Canadian Chamber of Commerce delegate-approved policy on CASL reform. In the last 18 months, Schiestel has written three articles for the Financial Post (August 16, 2016, May 17, 2017 and November 21, 2017) on CASL reform. During the House of Commons INDU Committee’s 2017 statutory review of CASL, Schiestel was asked to provide witness testimony to the committee on October 19 and he further served on policy taskforces for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Coalition of Business & Technology Associations.

Schiestel serving as a panelist at the London Chamber’s 2017 Digital Privacy Event.

Schiestel serving as an expert witness at the House of Commons INDU Committee Oct. 19, 2017 hearing on CASL.

In 2017, Schiestel, along with a team of advisors, went on to form the not-for-profit corporation, Lighten CASL Inc. (o/a #LightenCASL), with tbk Creative as its digital agency. Light CASL’s mission is to see CASL improved to be easier for companies to comply with while still protecting consumers.

Schiestel continues to serve on the Board of the London Chamber, working hard with the Chamber’s Board to continue to improve the economic environment that our Canadian businesses operate in.

In 2017, Schiestel commenced the position of President (Chair) of the London Chamber of Commerce (for the 2017/2018 fiscal year).

Jeff Macoun (Executive VP, Great West Life), former President of the Chamber, passing the President’s gavel onto Schiestel at the July 2017 Chamber Board meeting.

Taking pride in the work

Today, tbk Creative has become one of Canada’s premiere web design and digital marketing agencies. We focus on enterprise level WordPress solutions, build in ecommerce platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce and BigCommerce, and develop and manage full-service digital marketing solutions for brands.

A lot of good things have happened to tbk Creative in the last eight years, and we’ve worked hard, but it’s not beyond us that we have caught some luck along the way. Many people took a chance on us when we were starting out, and for that we’re grateful.

We also know that the Internet continues to evolve in ways no one can precisely foresee. We embrace this evolution and continue to look forward to the privilege of serving our clients through these changes, so that they can continue to be competitive and thrive in a digital global marketplace.